Thursday, June 21, 2012

A Review of Purgatory by Jeff MannGenre: Literary FictionEdition: Kindle, Published by Bear Bones Books, Inc. 2012 Widely available in EBook and Print editions.

A
five-star review should be hard-earned, in order for it to carry
weight. A really brilliant piece of literature displays the writer’s
ability to perform a few acrobatic feats – this requires a real
understanding of the technical aspects of writing. If a writer can do
this, and do it in a unique fashion, the book will be inspiring, not
merely a good read. With “Purgatory”, Jeff Mann has offered up a
gourmet feast of a book for the discerning reader, the hopeful
historian, the language-loving fellow writer, and certainly for this
picky reviewer.

“Purgatory” is a story of and within the worst
campaigns of the Civil War. It is a literary novel in the true sense,
not a romance – the romance in the book, while central to the story and
consistently engaging, is only a tool by which the author discusses
deeper meaning about the human experience. The bloodiest battles of the
Civil War took place in and around the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia:
in 1862, during the early years of the war, southern general Stonewall
Jackson waged a successful campaign to turn away Union invaders to the
traditionally southern enclave, observing “If this Valley is lost,
Virginia is lost.” But shortly after, the tide began to turn as first
the north-western section of Virginia split off in 1863 (later to be
called “West Virginia”) in order to disassociate itself from the
Confederacy, and the North realized that the Shenandoah Valley was a
major source of food supplies to General Lee’s troops. The campaign the
North waged in late 1864 that burned, ravaged and destroyed the Valley,
turned the tide of the war for good and sealed the fate of the
Confederacy. Jeff Mann’s insightful, moving story tells the story of
the hearts of the men who watched their farms and fields burn and their
heritage disappear into ashes. These are poor soldiers, trudging almost
blindly from one corner of the Valley to another, both fearing and
anticipating encountering the enemy, subsisting on meager supplies and
often little to no food (while Northern troops are federally supplied
and eat well).

Young Ian, a farmer from the mountains of northern
West Virginia, has watched the North invade and pillage his home and
that of his relatives, for three years and for political reasons he
hardly grasps. As the war nears its closing weeks – a fact of which he
is of course unaware, as all they are – he finds himself still a soldier
and weary of destruction and killing, beyond homesick. His commanding
officer – his uncle Sarge – is equally weary and bitter to boot: as is
the case with many of the straggling remaining soldiers of a once large
company, his farm was burned, livestock shot, wife murdered. He nurses
his anger by periodically capturing a Yankee soldier and torturing him
slowly to death. Ian is routinely given the exalted position of nursing
the victim, just enough to keep him alive for more torture - until
either Sarge gets bored and kills him with his bare hands, or the man
dies of starvation, his injuries, or exposure. Sarge means to “toughen
up” his gentle, book-loving nephew by forcing his compliance in the
torture and murder, but the challenge is even greater for Ian than Sarge
knows: Ian is sexually attracted to men, and has found himself more
than once attracted to a prisoner that was later killed. As the book
begins, the nightmare is repeating itself once again: the newest
prisoner, a young Yankee from Pennsylvania, quickly inspires the deepest
of desires and emotions in Ian, and this time Ian is not willing to
lose the battle of wills he will inevitably wage with Sarge and his
cohorts.

As the days crawl by and the torture increases in its
cruelty, as it becomes more and more difficult for Ian to heal Drew’s
wounds and save his life, Ian realizes that the principles that once
fueled his devotion to the Confederate cause are dimming: he will risk
his own life and turn his back on his friends and culture, in order to
save his lover and build a life for them – a chance at a life where two
men can touch one another as they do in the stories of The Iliad and in
Walt Whitman’s poems. These works of literature are the thing that Ian,
and through him Drew, clings to as evidence that he is not some freak
in the world – where terms like “gay” are not available. The author
invites the reader into a world before mass media, where one’s circle of
acquaintances was small, where religious tolerance was limited, where
it was easy to think you were the “only one”, a freak of nature, God’s
joke. The painful isolation these men feel screams from the pages time
and again, and is heartbreaking.

Jeff Mann is a writer’s writer:
he was first a poet, and it shows. The book is relayed in a first
person, present tense narrative mode – something little attempted in
modern literature, and terribly effective when so expertly done. It
lends a sense of immediacy and intimacy that, combined with the author’s
extensive use of historical detail, pulls the reader into the filthy,
tired, poverty-stricken last days of a too-long war. Mann’s command of
language is complete: it is luxurious but never overly-sentimental. A
description of the climax of their first sexual contact:

"His
thighs stiffen, his hands grip the back of my head, he heaves against
my face, and my mouth floods with the milk of him, surge after surge I
gulp down. He tastes like sarvis berries, marigold petals, prayer. If
prayers were solids, not sounds, this is what God would taste, what God
would learn to crave.”

Two metaphors are central to the
story: the first is made up of religious imagery. Many times, Drew is
described in Christ-like terms, as an innocent (despite his crimes as a
Northern soldier against the Valley), as a wounded martyr to the fury of
war-weary soldiers. As Drew trudges along shackled and tied to a cart,
increasingly weakened by his torture, increasingly humiliated and
demoralized, at one point forced to carry a log upon his shoulders like a
cross, he is described as marching toward Calvary (the place of
crucifixion) and fed hope by Ian that if only he can will himself to
survive until they reach Mount Purgatory (Purgatory being the Christian
symbol of second chances, of redemption from sin) they will run for
freedom. These Christian images are particularly interesting because Ian
has long-since ceased to believe in the faith of his childhood, and
also because Christianity is used by Sarge and his thugs to justify
torture and hatred, and disgust at “sodomites” – which is of course what
Ian knows he is.

A second, and even more interesting metaphor
has to do with mythology and the image of the Greek or Roman warrior,
held in bonds, bleeding, yet physically perfect and still strong at
heart. Tangled with this imagery is Ian’s sexual arousal at seeing his
love object tortured: Ian is a small, wiry man (although given to fits
of ferocity in battle), and wrestles with a part of himself that enjoys
the power he feels at seeing a large, handsome, strong warrior of a man
broken. His continuous fight with himself throughout the book to
reconcile his love of Drew with his desire to see him tortured,
parallels the human desire to see a stronger individual lose to oneself
and the seldom admitted-to and common sexual link. The book has been
described as an exercise in BDSM: but that cheapens its message. The
torture in this book is non-consentual, and as it increases, the turn-on
Ian feels decreases. At some point he recognizes it as just plain
brutality and he wants it to end: he is in fact human not only in his
demons, but in his compassion. The message is universal to us all.

At
the book’s poignant end, as the two lovers discuss whether anyone will
remember them and how they lived and fought, Drew imagines a
near-unimagined future of tolerance:

“No, I mean the men
who come.” Drew swallows hard, resting the butt of his rifle on the rock
beneath us, “Who will come to be born. Men like us. Men who, well,
touch one another like you and I touch. Like in the Whitman poems you
read me. Like in The Iliad. It’s a comfort thinking that they are there,
somewhere. That they might be there, long after we’re gone, they’re
thinking of us. Looking back for us. From some more fortunate place.”

Ultimately,
“Purgatory”, like the best of books, is about all of us – about the
demons within ourselves of which we are ashamed, about loneliness and
the terror of isolation, about a world that often presents unimaginable
cruelties and how we each must decide how brave we are going to be – and
what we will give up for the freedom to love.

The first thing that must be said about The Trail to Moonlight Gulch is that is a rollicking good read – never less than entertaining. Somerset has a knack for drawing interesting characters, compelling the reader to stay glued to the story. And a good story it is: set in late nineteenth-century Chicago and Dakota Territory, it is full of angst, twists and turns, surprises, sweet romance, danger and suspense. Unfortunately, for the discerning reader, the book contains some glaring flaws, but these are made up for by the excitement inherent in the story itself.

Nineteen-year-old Torsten Pilkvist is a good boy. The son of Swedish immigrants, the owners of a bakery and boarding house in Chicago, his days are filled with diligently and respectfully working at his family’s business. But Torsten dreams of finding a way to leave home and start an adult life, and he is tormented by the shame in the realization that he is sexually attracted to men. When he meets the love of his life, things seem to be looking up, until a tragic accident changes the course of his hopes. Despairing, he answers an ad for a mail-order bride to the Black Hills of the wild Dakota Territory– but he answers it deliberately keeping his gender to himself. Predictably he falls for the letters’ recipient, and vice-versa. And more predictably, a final confrontation with his parents over his sexual preferences leads to Torsten’s fleeing toward the West to find the frontiersman of his fantasies – despite the lie upon which their correspondence has flourished.

Somerset is a master at painting a picture of the daily details of the past. One can see the streets of Chicago, smell the air, feel the surge of immigration. The pages are furnished with historical factual details that make reading fascinating for the fan of a good historical novel. Likewise, the latter part of the book paints a picture of the American frontier in which one smells the pine, hears the trickle of waterfalls, senses the tension of the gold-rush years, and appreciates the stark contrast between the easier life east of the Mississippi and the hard physical labor required to carve out a life in the West. The homestead on which Franklin Ausmus lives is so vivid that one deeply feels its terrific impending loss when it is threatened.

The problems with the book come mainly in the last quarter. The first three-quarters of the book read quickly, enticingly – although this reader heaved a sigh at the suggestion that a nineteen-year-old finds a forty-year-old sexually attractive, particularly in an era where people who lived hard lives aged quickly; the May-December cliché is much overdone in gay romance. But barring that failed suspension of disbelief – there are some problems that should never appear in an otherwise well-written book. Perhaps most frustrating is the abundance of clichés. These come to a head when during a final shootout at the homestead, we have someone falling shot from a tower, then crawling on his belly to painfully raise a rifle and fire the shot that saves the hero; we have a villain having been dispatched with several gunshots, then rising from the dead to stand and aim a rifle at the hero one more time. These kinds of things leave the reader rolling eyes. There are also lapses in logic – for example when a character steals a horse and drops his duffle bag, only to magically be in possession of the contents of the bag later; men have anal sex repeatedly without anyone using any type of lube or adequate preparation (elementary research for a writer hoping to write gay sex scenes!). Most annoying are the glaring grammatical errors in the final quarter of the book. These matter because they break the flow of reading – forcing the reader’s mind to stop abruptly.

Unfortunately, such a foray into cliché, illogic, and technical error hurts the believability of the story overall and lessens the quality of the book. Still, the story as an idea is so terribly good, the description so well-done, and the characters so strong, that this reviewer must somewhat reluctantly assign a four of five stars. If the reader can look past the occasional silliness, the book is well worth the time.

If you read Gentlemen's Game, please drop me a note to tell me if you liked it!

DESCRIPTION:

When young playwright Greyson Foster agrees to attend a party at the penthouse of a millionaire, he has no idea how profoundly it will change his life. His journey will take him into spaces in his mind he never knew existed, bring him face-to-face with needs he never knew he had, and challenge him to travel to the precipice of lust, revenge, and love. From their first meeting, the powerful and charismatic Jack Miles weaves an enticing web around Greyson, drawing him into the dangerous game three millionaires play in secret. But Jack's personal life is complicated and his demons are many, and as they strengthen they threaten to destroy all that Jack holds dear - including Greyson.

"Thank you for sharing this wonderful story with us....I will truly miss these characters. I really do think about this story all the time - replaying parts over, thinking about the characters feelings and struggles. I will definitely be re-reading this again. Thank you!!!!"

"This story is deep, meaningful, addicting, flawless."

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Newest Reviews for "Gentlemen's Game"

From writer Ross McCoubrey 5/5 stars: "Really enjoyed this very different novel that doesn't fall easily into one genre. Marking it as M/M romance isn't accurate as it is a story about a bond of friendship as well as love... which just happens to be about men together. The author uses a very engaging style with characters that are both likeable and flawed. Without giving away major plot-points, the mid-section of the novel will surprise and shock but it will also make you stop and think about similar relationships you have heard of within heterosexual couples. Love, like so many other emotions, doesn't know gender, nor does it always prove rational or safe. Lichen Craig has developed a story that makes you think, without judging, and that is the mark of a gifted writer."

From prize-winning writer Erasmo Guerra 5/5 stars:"I read this novel at the beginning of 2012. Now, as we come to the final days of the year, I have to say that of all the characters I met in the books I read later, my thoughts keep returning to these men and their "Gentlemen's Game."

From Amazon: "...It invokes strong feelings from us, it makes us think deeply and I believe that is the intention.
As a matter of fact, this story was probably closer to real life than a vast percentage of the books I have read in this genre and for that, I am thankful. Thank you Lichen, for dragging me out of my sugar coated reverie and giving me a good dose of brain starter."

From Amazon 5/5: "I bought this book a few days ago upon the recommendation of a friend and I am glad I did. This is a phenomenal read! The characters are well fleshed out and the plot is unique and thought-provoking. It draws you in from the very beginning and doesn't let go until long after the story is over."

From Amazon 4/5: "This book was a surprise for me. I found it very enjoyable. I felt the characters were likable, engaging. It handled the subject of rape in a sensitive, and real manner."

From Amazon 5/5: "The book weaves a tapestry of love, lust, highs and lows in the lives of four men, their relationships entangled in more ways than one. Through the openness of their relationships, it shows their bonds are strong, yet pushed to the breaking point. It leaves you wanting more."

AND. . . Read Nan Hawthorne's new review of Gentlemen's Game at the GLBT Bookshelf!

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